Iain Humphries shares how his finance roots and FP&A experience laid the groundwork for his approach to value consulting—storytelling with numbers for external audiences. At Databricks, he’s scaled value consulting through a period of hypergrowth, prioritizing a lean global team to support a broad and complex use case landscape. Yan emphasizes the “three Cs” of value consulting—Connect, Challenge, Communicate—as foundational for influencing sales behavior and buyer decision-making. He unpacks the tension between high ACV strategic bets and lower maturity customers with massive potential, and highlights the need for repeatable value frameworks, prioritization models, and sales-aligned tooling to scale effectively.

Iain also explores the critical role of value in combatting indecision, simplifying buyer messaging, supporting usage-based pricing, and partnering with emerging Value Realization Offices to align forecasted and actual outcomes in data and AI transformations.